Start in engineering
Starting in the engineering organization I think is the simplest way to affect change on documentation culture. There are lots of other parts of an organization, but it’s easier to get permission to work on just the internal stuff to engineering. Think things like:
Project documentation
Operations documentation
Playbooks
Monitoring Information
Best Practices
Style Guides (View Highlight)
Gather Input
You will want members from all of the teams in your organization to be invited to the planning meetings. They don’t need to come, but you need to make sure it’s an open and public discussion. This validates the outcome of the planning, and makes sure that you are taking into account all of the use cases of your team. (View Highlight)
Build a taxonomy
A big problem with a lot of documentation systems is that they have been organized organically, AKA have no organization. If you build out a structure for people to start, and keep it consistent across projects, it will make everyones lives easier. (View Highlight)
Note
You need to have an answer to the “Where do I put it?” question. (View Highlight)
Make it easy
Getting started should be as easy and straight-forward as possible. Most people don’t like change, and introducing new tooling and things will already rouse a negative response in some. This is why you need to make it as simple as possible to get started. (View Highlight)
Build templates
It should take about 5 seconds to get a basic outline of the documentation for a project started.
Also have a standard hierarchy for the docs, so that people know where to look for things in any project. (View Highlight)